Customer Testimonials

Just to let you know, I tried out Har-Bal on a 3 song project yesterday (my first try with Har-Bal) and have to say I'm sold! The mix I have is great and everything was sounding pretty good, but I could not quite get the sound I want to translate out of the studio and onto the home stereo or in the car. Close, but not quite. Then I tried Har-Bal.... In no time at all I was able to successfully get three great masters done! I've played them on every system I could get my hands on and they sound just the way I've always imagined they would. Great product!!!

Dave McIsaac
Diddle Records
www.diddlerecords.com
 

Hi,

First, congratulations. Great product, really like it and it has very quickly become an indispensable reference tool.

Secondly, the attitude you guys have is very refreshing. Well done. I hope you can maintain it in this horrible music industry that we all populate!! I am blown away by the information and your positive responses in your customer FAQ despite some of the questions being a trifle impertinent at times!

If you ever require an endorsement or comment from us on your truly great product, well you've already got it. Well done.

Oh... And I'm not after anything - I'm just genuinely impressed technically and by your company attitude. nice

Rich Narco
Producer
N I M R O D
www.nimrodproductions.com
 

Dear Paavo

WOW!

I just installed your HAR-BAL and used it on a couple of songs I have been killing myself over on a really nice jazz album that I tracked and mixed and mastered last month. Those two tunes were the bane of my life..thinish and the bass was just plain weird. I spent maybe 10 hours on those two pieces remixing, remastering over and over, trying to bring them into line with the rest (which I didn't charge the clients for because I thought it was something I felt I needed to solve myself), but I was still unsatisfied with the results.

I have been dragging my feet in producing the final master. Then comes HAR--BAL...and in 15 minutes without knowing diddly about the program these two tunes are solid.

Thanks so much! Mastering some songs was a mystery, an almost endless do-loop, coupled with dozens of CDs burned and tried in every place I knew to get a final perfect master.

Things are going to be a lot happier around Grass Shack Records from now on.

Mahalo,
Richard Harrison
www.GrassShackRecords.com

PS: Feel free to use my heartfelt comments on your site. And keep me informed on your new upgrades. I would love to see you guys make this as a plugin as an analysis tool on a track to help to see the spectral energy in a track in mixing situations. See, you have me dreaming!
RH
 

Earle,

Thank you for this program. It has made mixing and mastering my music so much easier. It's great to be able to use both your eyes and ears when working with music. Your program has allowed me to take some of my past recordings and breath new life into them. My instruments jump out where they used to be buried. My sampled instruments sound almost authentic. Thank you again.

Best regards,
Phil Hogg
 

HarBal is absolutely remarkable. I just used it 15 minutes ago on a remix of the Sopranos theme which I had done last month but the master was put on one side because it was missing something and we had spent hours tuning it and were only making it worse. HarBal showed the problem IMMEDIATELY and fixed it in less than a minute. The improvement was remarkable. Normally I can get pretty close to a good balanced master with just my ears but with this track I just couldn't do it. My ears were not tuning correctly to the heavy electronic instrumental tone colors.

The greatest wonder of this tool is the automatic maintenance of perceived loudness with Eq edits. Any fool can adjust an Eq but doing it and compensating for the loudness adjustment used to be a pain in the butt. You ended up taking twice as long to avoid audio references drifting all over the place. I can now "trust" my Eq edits and the freedom this gives everyone makes HarBal, in my humble opinion, the single most important item of audio equipment I have purchased since I invested thousands of dollars in two DPA (B&K) mics some years ago. Please keep developing this gem. This software is one in a million.

Paavo please feel free to use the above in any marketing/advertising endorsement you wish. I hope HarBal is the big commercial success it deserves to be.

Best regards
Everett Hoskins
Producer, Cari Vaughn
http://www.carivaughnmusic.com/
 
Last night I spent more time using Har-Bal and then finished up with the mastering chain you suggested. First of all, Har-Bal is just amazing! I can't believe how much of a difference it makes. I thought my mix was decent, but Har-Bal makes it possible to dramatically improve what I originally thought sounded decent. And I know I've only scratched the surface. I suspect the more time I spend with it, the easier it will be to get the mix just the way it should sound. The two songs I worked on last night sound better than anything I've done without professional mastering. I'm not a mastering engineer and don't think Bob Ludwig has anything to worry about, but Har-Bal makes listening to my own mix very listenable. Congratulations on creating a fantastic program. I know I said this before, but I will enthusiastically tell everyone I know who does any recording about Har-Bal. It's so rare that a program does what it says it will do. Har-Bal does!

Best Regards,
Paul Alfery
MI District Sales Manager
Roland Corporation US

 
 

Hey Guys!,

I just wanted to thank you for the Har-Bal program!

I spent a year working on a CD project. The demos I sent to the mastering house sounded great, but when the engineer began the process of mastering, something just went wacky with my mixes. The engineer couldn't do much with it except beef up the audio signal.

After getting the master back, I was devastated (to say the least). I just didn't know what to do, so I loaded the mastered music into the Har-Bal, manipulated the songs, and was able to straighten all of the frequencies out perfectly!! Using a regular 31 band EQ would not get the results I needed.

The Har-Bal cleaned up the mix, and never degraded the quality of the music, no matter how many changes I made.

Thanks Hal-Bar creator!

The Har-Bal Kicks Butt, and saved mine!!!

Sincerely,
Kevin
www.steelwind.net
 

I just finished a 6 song demo and Har-Bal was indispensable. It is even more powerful than I originally had understood.

Besides normalizing all the tracks I was able to really spend time A/B testing with and without. Spent a lot of time in certain magic frequencies determining the effect of Har-Bal. All I can say is that my mixes done in my little home studio are as loud for sure as any commercial product and (minus the technical flaws - after all it is a demo) really does come across full spectrum. Thanks for such a great product and making it affordable for the home studio owner. Can't wait for the next released rev.

Respectfully,
Jeff Milkey
 

I just had to write and let you know how impressed I am with this program. I have labored over mastering for a long time and your program made it not only easy but easy to understand. I love the visual aspect of being able to see the results of my work and also the ability to switch from one setting to another to compare and select the best one. I'm a Mac user and I just bought a PC so I can use your application. That's how impressed I am!

Thanks and keep up the good work.

Larry Gadler - RattleSnakeTracks Studio
http://www.rattlesnaketracks.com/
 
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Har-Bal version 2.3 can be purchased and downloaded immediately through RegNet by following this link.

Mastering Tutorial

Mastering TutorialThe following is a mastering tutorial explaining many tips, tricks and audio mastering secrets. There are a number of methods used to accomplish harmonic balancing or spectral correction. Your tracks will sound their best when they are first processed in Har-Bal before any digital eq or multiband compression/limiting is applied.

Read More...

FAQ's

Looks like a Steinberg Free Filter rip-off to me!

Yes, it does similar things to the Free Filter plugin but with significant differences.

Har-Bal is stand-alone which affords it a degree of usability that is not possible with a plugin.

The way you design an EQ filter in Har-Bal is totally different and more flexible. Free Filter is constrained to 1/3 octave. Har-Bal has no such constraint.

The way Steinberg's Free Filter and Har-Bal assess the spectral content of the music is very different too. Har-Bal works off the average of the entire track because the average of the entire track will best describe peaks that will cause listening fatigue. Looking at an RTA you get some idea but it isn't as clear cut as an average for the entire track. Har-Bal also tracks the peak spectrum too.

And the biggest difference as far as usability is concerned is compensating for perceived loudness effects which, as far as we're aware, only Har-Bal does. What do we mean by that?

A simple example can be visualized as follows.

If you had a graphic EQ in front of you and you realized a particular frequency using only boost and on a parallel one you implemented the same frequency response using only cut. Now do an A/B test on both and which sounds better? Obviously the one that uses only boost because it is louder, although from an Eq'ing point of view they are identical!

You might say this is a trivial case and you should adjust the EQ to use nominally the same boost and cut and then you'd only have one "correct" frequency response. Wrong! This would only be true if the source material was largely "pink" and human hearing wasn't frequency and level dependent! In performing mastering equalization neither of these assumptions are true so how do you account for the different perceived loudness in different EQ arrangements when performing A/B assessments? At worst you don't and at best you guess. Neither approach is objective.

Har-Bal takes an educated guess which is objective and likely to be far less biased than any manual approach. It does so by calculating a loudness index for the pre and post equalization spectrums and adding or removing the appropriate gain to the EQ'd case to remove loudness related biases. It is an educated guess in the sense that an A-weighting curve is only approximately indicative of human loudness perception at 85dB SPL but it's a far better approximation than being left to your own devices.

On this subject Har-Bal is not as good as it could be. Replacement of the A-weighting curve with something more accurate (at the HF end) would be better and we should also cater for different monitoring levels (other than 85 dB) because some like to preserve their hearing while others like to destroy it. But if we waited until everything was catered for it would never be released.